The entrance to the James E. Rogers College of Law on the University of Arizona campus.
The University of Arizona’s Innocence Project has been awarded $1.5 million from the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance to support investigative work into wrongful convictions using DNA evidence analysis.
It is the largest grant that the university’s law clinic, which is dedicated to freeing people that have been wrongfully imprisoned, has ever received.
The award comes at a time where the clinic’s intake is at an all time high, about a couple 100 cases are waiting for review.
“We have a couple dozen cases that are in review by students and supervising attorneys and we have about half dozen cases that we are actively litigating or in advanced stages of investigation right now,” said Vanessa Buch, director of the law clinic.
The clinic does work pro-bono, as a member of the nationwide Innocence Network, using upper level law students and a staff of attorneys to review cases where convicted individuals in Arizona, have claims of actual innocence.
“My hoped outcomes with this funding is that the support and funding from BJA will enable us to identify individuals who are wrongfully convicted in Arizona and to secure their release.”
She added that it will also enable the clinic to train more law students to recognize the causes of wrongful convictions and be trained advocates as they matriculate through law school.
“Ultimately, the cases that we look at, the lessons we learned from them can be applied down the road to identifying more wrongful convictions cases and understanding how these things occur to begin with,” Buch said.
In Arizona, there have been only three documented DNA exonerations since 1989– despite advances in DNA testing leading to more exonerations nationwide and over two dozen non-DNA exonerations according to Buch.
“What we see often is cases where DNA testing that may have been previously done or previously considered, the testing at the time wasn’t sensitive enough or didn’t have the capacity to get the results,” Buch said. “But now, years later we can go back to some of those cases.”
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